HANS AARSMAN’S
HISTORY OF THE PRESENT.
Hans Aarsman is a photographer, novelist, playwright, curator and journalist. He’s also lectured widely at various universities and events, including TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design). For Dutch broadsheet De Volkskrant, he writes a popular weekly column on news photography, conducting a detectivelikeinvestigation into a particular news photograph, its hidden agendas and how it came to be constructed.
Here, he discusses the points where news meets advertising, advertising photography versus news photography, the power of media and which ads work for him.
BACKGROUND.
“At university I began studying physics and chemistry. After three years you have a practice exam and then you continue, working in laboratories. I was not interested at that point. I thought it was so boring. What we studied was a very small detail of another thing that was also a detail of yet another bigger thing. It was all details and you lost the big picture. So I quit.
“I started to study the Dutch language and literature. Linguistics. I graduated and taught for one or two years at schools before realizing that this was also not something I wanted to go on with. And then I discovered photography. I made my own reportage photos and tried to sell them to the newspapers. It finally worked, so I became a photojournalist.
“I like photography because it’s very practical. It’s about a machine and equipment that you have to get used to. You have to be handy and quick. It’s also a way of expressing yourself but it’s not too poetic. I liked journalism because media for me is like the history of now. It’s the history of the present.
“But after a few years I discovered this recurring structure in photojournalism. This is the conflict structure – there’s always this almost biblical conflict between good and evil. In most newspaper images you’ll see one side opposing another, whether those sides are protestors, politicians, or soldiers. So I got bored with that too. I thought, ‘That’s not the way I want to look at the world.’ For me, the world’s about much more than black-and-white conflict. It’s more versatile and paradoxical.
“So I bought a camper van and I went through Holland taking pictures, trying to take photographs that weren’t constrained by form. fig. 16 Just to find another way of looking at things, trying to find my own style of photography.
“I made a book of the camper trip images and realized that these were form-based too. I thought, ‘I should stop with photography because it’s too much form.’
Fig. 16: Gas station, seen from the roof of Hans’s camper, Nijmegen, September 1988.
“I took up writing. While on assignment in the municipality of Gent I revisited photography, but it was hopeless. So I stayed in my hotel room and I read the only book I thought was interesting: Sherlock Holmes.
“Here, I got this idea that you can approach photography not for the form but only for the facts that are in the photograph. And that’s what I’m doing now: to me a photograph’s form is not interesting, but the facts of it are. That was inspired by Sherlock Holmes – just the facts. A photograph is interesting if the facts in the photograph are interesting.”
NEWS IS PROBLEMS, ADVERTISING SELLS THE SOLUTIONS.
“You have the feeling that your life is constantly threatened, by evil forces or by your own stupidity, by your mistakes. News shows us these problems and adverts give us possible solutions. In a newspaper you see a dialogue, with the news saying the world’s a horrible place, and the adverts saying things will be better ‘if you swallow this,’ ‘if you put this on your face,’ ‘if you buy this.’ So it’s like news and ads are two sides of the same whole.”
THE BIRTH OF PR.
“Edward Bernays is one of the people credited with inventing advertising, particularly public relations. He was one of Sigmund Freud’s nephews, and he believed in this post-First World War notion that people don’t think in a rational way. Instead of tuning into their rational thinking, you should tune into their desires. And that’s what you see in communications all the time even today.
“An early example of this from Bernays was when he tried to get women to start smoking. One Easter Day, he hired a little group of suffragettes and told the newspapers that the suffragettes were planning an action. He told the papers when and where they should be in order to witness this event. He didn’t explain what exactly would happen. So the papers showed up, and the suffragettes took out cigarettes hidden underneath their skirts. They started smoking. They called it ‘The Torch of Freedom.’
“Bernays was a product of the time. After all this production of military goods, America had been turned into a mass-production society. How to get people to buy all this stuff? In this climate, there was suddenly a lot of space for ideas about advertising.”
ADVERTISING, AS SEEN BY A JOURNALIST.
“What I like about advertising is how it cleverly combines image and text. In newspapers, image and text are divided. So you have this group of photo editors and this group of guys who write the stories, and they’re always separate. In advertising, you have the copywriter and the art director and they team up, and I think that’s a very interesting way of producing messages.
“I like advertising because it’s much more cleverly made than journalism. Because of this art director/copywriter team, you end up with more possibilities for contradiction between the headline and image, for instance. In the newspaper it’s impossible to work that way. As a photo editor, the only feedback you get is: ‘the elements in the picture do not fit the text.’ And so you have to change the picture.
“Journalism always favours text over images. The picture has to legitimize the text. The exception to this are some of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, where the interplay between text and image is much better.”
ADVERTISING, MEET JOURNALISM.
“The most straightforward way in which journalism becomes a form of advertising is press releases. Seventy-five percent of what you read is based on a press release. People still don’t know that most of what they’re reading is a form of advertising.
“There are various reasons for this. One is the cut-backs in journalism. As a journalist you don’t have so much time any more. There are far fewer journalists at their desks, so you are forced to cut corners and use all this free publicity stuff to fill space.
“Another factor is that the line between a press release and news is often vague, even to a journalist. This is because press releases are frequently offered through the news agencies. In this way, an extra layer is added. The journalist thinks, ‘Oh, this is from the news agency, it must be legitimate,’ but the news agency gets it from the business people.
“So, primarily, it’s market forces that have led us here. I think pure journalism is investigation, but this isn’t the case any more, albeit with rare exceptions like The Guardian. The noble reasons for getting into journalism, finding the truth and so on, are still used to attract people to the profession, but really it’s mostly PR now.
“Here’s a fairly extreme illustration of this. If you go to the website of ANP, that’s the Dutch news agency, and you want stories for your company or your sports club or your group, you just pay for it. Buy a headline. If it’s really interesting and everybody reads your story, then you don’t even have to pay. So you cut out the middle man: there’s no PR agency, there’s no advertising agency.
“But there are subtler versions of this process. For instance, if you have a demonstration, and you don’t have any press, then there wouldn’t be a demonstration. fig. 17 The demonstration happens because the organizers know the press is going to be there.”
Fig. 17: A typical image of confl ict as represented in newspapers. Taken during the crowning of Holland’s Queen Beatrix, April 1980.
THE UNEXPECTEDLY HONEST BUSINESS OF ADVERTISING.
“I think journalism is more unethical than pure advertising. I think advertising is honest about what it wants. Journalism on the other hand is hidden, but it’s still mostly advertising.
“Having said that, I don’t like to think in moral terms about things because it makes it harder to see the possibilities and to discover things. When I grew tired of the structures in images from photojournalism it was because they were dull and predictable, not because they were morally wrong.
“In my work, I like to get across how rich everything is and discover new possibilities. If you start looking at things in one way, it’s just like wearing a certain set of glasses. Every time you change those glasses, everything changes, your whole perspective changes.
This happened every time I changed my style of photography – you start interpreting things in a different way. In the case of advertising, if an ad changes how you view the world, then it’s an acceptable form of advertising. VW is an example of a brand that does this consistently. What I like about the old VW ads is that they’re treating the public like adults, daring to talk about their product in a negative way.
“When I don’t like something in advertising or journalism, it’s the clichés I dislike, not the moral issues. That’s what I step back from.”
ON THE OTHER HAND.
“However, what I do think is that it would probably be better for society if people wouldn’t be so happy with owning stuff, with materialism. If you are more interested in things in the world around you, then you are no longer interested in actions that make other people unhappy.
“And what advertising teaches you is how to get ideas across, so maybe you can use that skill for something else, for getting desires to go in a direction that has nothing to do with materialism.”
UNDERESTIMATING THE MEDIA.
“If you take the widest perspective, I think the news is really, really very important in how we perceive the world. Much more so than pure advertising, which ultimately is only about selling stuff.”
“Nevertheless, often advertising techniques are used by people trying to get in the news. An example of this is the Tea Party. They’re being focused on the whole time. If the Tea Party does something, you see all these pictures at the press agencies. Why? Well, Rupert Murdoch’s people helped them, gave them courses. For instance, the Tea Party used to print their demonstration boards. However, they stopped after they were advised that handmade boards would be seen as more genuine, as a really personal expression of feeling. That’s a kind of advertising. It’s corporate.”
DO YOU THINK JOURNALISM IS BECOMING LESS LIKE ADVERTISING BECAUSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA?
“In some ways, journalism is going back to its pure investigative roots because regular people are handling the entertainment side of the news online, via blogs and Twitter. Fast facts and PR-style stories, that’s increasingly covered by Twitter. What’s really behind the facts, that will become journalism again.”
MAKE NEWS NEW.
“In order to make advertising that I’d like, you first need a new concept of news. I think it’s connected. News and advertising: it’s all media. But what that new form of advertising/news would be, I don’t know.
“But I’d like to experiment in this area, maybe through a little magazine, and try to find new ways of finding interesting things to tell other people. It would be all about avoiding clichés, and treating people like grown ups.”